When the Doctor Gets Bored
by OwlinAMinor
Summary: The Doctor got bored, so he decided to run up all of the escalators in the London Tube. And then Mickey got kidnapped by homicidal pigeons. And Rose was pissed off. Christmas present for my friend Tom. Oneshot. 10/Rose/Mickey, but not really.


**Title: When the Doctor Gets Bored**

**Pairing: 10/Rose/Mickey or something**

**Genre: Humor & ... Adventure, I guess**

**Summary: The Doctor got bored, so he decided to run up all of the escalators in the London Tube. And then Mickey got kidnapped by homicidal pigeons. And Rose was pissed off. Christmas present for my friend Tom.**

**Length: oneshot**

**Dissing of the Claims: I'm running out of creative ways to do these, so DOCTOR WHO ISN'T MINE.**

**A/N: The tenth Christmas present fanfic I'm posting. (I wrote all of my friends these fanfics for Christmas because I'm broke.) This one, I didn't get a specific request for (besides Doctor Who), so I decided to base the plot on private jokes related to a school trip to London that I went on last year with the person I wrote the fic for. That explains the running up escalators, the homicidal pigeons, and the random bit with the fedora at the end. xD Enjoy.**

* * *

One day – a foggy, slightly drizzly day if you happened to live in London, which is honestly no real help at all, because most days are like that in London – the Doctor was bored.

So, being the Doctor, he decided to announce this in an extremely loud, irritating fashion, and then make some lists, pie charts, diagrams, and so on about how he could cure his boredom.

Rose suggested that he should just take them somewhere they hadn't been before, preferably someplace exciting, not too dangerous, and warm, because she had a new bikini she wanted to show off, but the Doctor replied that no, that was boring, they did that _every_ day. Not if we go someplace really _exciting_, she shot back, and soon they had a full-blown argument going.

Mickey suggested that the Doctor should show him how the TARDIS worked, because he actually was quite curious, but nobody heard him, and so he was sad.

After some intense discussions that somehow diverged to the topic of the potential zombie apocalypse, the Doctor finally put his foot down. Yes, he put his actual foot down on the TARDIS floor. (Of course, he put his metaphorical foot down as well, saying that he was going to cure his boredom his way, and that was that, but the literal putting down of the foot was more important.)

He consulted his lists, pie charts, diagrams, and so on, and, some deliberation later, announced, "I've got it! I'm going to do one of the things on my bucket list!"

Rose was okay with that – if was on the Doctor's bucket list, it must be something awesome, right? Mickey didn't really care one way or the other, which was good, because nobody cared about his opinion, anyway.

Of course, if they had known what the current top item on the Doctor's bucket list was, they might not have been so agreeable.

**~BREAAAAAAAAAAAK~**

"Doctor."

"Yes, Rose?"

"We're in a Tube station."

"So we are."

"Is there any particular reason we're in a Tube station?"

"I'm going to do something from my bucket list."

"… Here?"

"Yes, that's why we're here, isn't it?"

"But … _Here_?"

"Problem?"

"On the _Tube_?"

"Well, not exactly _on_ the Tube, per say …"

"Doctor, what's the thing on your bucket list you're about to do?"

"Run up every single staircase on the London Tube."

"_WHAT?!_"

**~ANOTHER BREAK, BREAKS ARE FUN, BREAKS ARE WIBBLY WOBBLY~**

"Remind me again why this is on your bucket list," Rose instructed the Doctor a couple of hours later, as they speed-walked to yet another staircase (and its sister escalator – you know, the thing that most intelligent people take, the one that carries you up so that you don't have to sprint up an entire flight of stairs, the one that makes your life easier) for the Doctor to run up.

"Because nobody ever takes the stairs anymore," the Doctor explained for what had to be the tenth time. "People are always in such a hurry that they have to get places as quickly and as easily as possible, so they avoid the stairs like the snot of a Judoon. The stairs are getting lonely. They miss being walked on. I'm doing them a favor, actually. And besides, it's great exercise – very nice practice for the awful lot of running I have to do. You should join me."

"First, I'm not joining you," Rose replied, "and second, only you could think that stairs get lonely."

"I'm taking that as a compliment," he shot back, grinning.

She rolled her eyes, but smiled back. "And remind me again how you persuaded me to watch you do this."

"I promised to take you to Space Florida when I'm done. Besides, you just love being my cheerleader – Ow!"

As they'd reached the stairs-and-escalator by this point, Rose stepped onto the escalator to avoid retribution, sticking her tongue out at him in victory. He glared at her, then took off his trench coat (it was getting a tad warm after twenty flights of stairs) and chucked it at her, much to the annoyance of the people next to her on the escalator. She caught it, of course.

"Allons-y!" the Doctor shouted, starting to race up the stairs.

He was panting when the escalator let Rose off, a minute or so later.

"Not attractive at all, that," she teased him, giving him back his trench coat.

He didn't answer until they were riding the next escalator back down – and even then, it wasn't actually an answer, as it was another question: "Hey, Rose?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you seen Mickey?"

**~BREAKS ARE ALSO TIMEY WIMEY~**

_Note to self,_ the Doctor thought, a good half hour later, _the next time Mickey goes missing, don't tell Rose about it. She won't notice if you don't point it out, so just don't tell her. At all. Not even a little bit._

Sometimes, he really wished he could use the TARDIS to change his own timeline, because he would have gone back half an hour ago and stopped his past self from telling Rose anything, so that he could have avoided this God-awful lecture she was still (_still_!) giving him now. The threats about never baking cookies for him in the TARDIS kitchen ever again, ever weren't exactly helpful, either.

He'd tried, he really had – tried to explain to Rose that Mickey's sudden disappearance was _not his fault_ – Mickey had decided to come along on his own accord, and besides, he was Rose's boyfriend, or friend, or whatever they were these days, so if he was anyone's responsibility (which he wasn't, because he was a responsible, capable young man), he was hers. Unfortunately, Rose had been too busy coming up with creative insults for him to listen.

Amazing woman, that Rose Tyler. She somehow managed to look incredibly sexy in her high black boots, leggings, short skirt, and sweater, even while she was yelling at him.

_No, Doctor, stop it, she's your companion, and sort-of maybe someone else's girlfriend._

_But she's too good for him …_

_NO STOP IT._

The Doctor was saved from his wandering mind when an automated chime began to play out of his right pants pocket – his cell phone was ringing.

Ignoring Rose's complaints ("Don't you _dare_ answer that, you can't ignore me while I'm yelling at you damn it!"), he answered it with a, "Hello, the Doctor speaking," – only to have his eardrums almost blown out of his head by a bloodcurdling scream.

"DOCTOOOORRRRR YOU HAVE TO HELP MEEEEEE I'M DOOOOOMED I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DOOOOOO AAAAHHHH –"

"Rose," he said calmly, putting a hand over the microphone to mute out the panic on the other end, "how, exactly, did Mickey get your cell phone?"

"Um, I asked him to carry it for me, because I don't have any pockets, and I forgot my purse at Mum's the last time we were there," she replied, momentarily surprised enough to forget she was supposed to be mad at him. "Why?"

Wordlessly, the Doctor held out his phone to her.

He's not entirely sure what happened next; all he knew was that when he held the phone, Mickey was an incomprehensible lump of shouting, sobbing terror, but after Rose had talked to him for no more than a minute or two, she snapped the phone shut with an air of decisiveness, grabbed the Doctor by the hand, and started pulling him in a direction opposite from the way they'd been walking before.

Mentally shrugging, he chalked it up to the powers of female persuasion. It had never been one of his strong points. (Although, in retrospect, perhaps he _should_ have taken that one class at the Academy on understanding the opposite sex …)

"So … Where are we going?" the Doctor asked, a decent bit of speed-walking later.

"To save Mickey," Rose answered, "duh."

"Yes, but where is he, exactly?" he prompted.

"He's been kidnapped by homicidal pigeons."

"Kidnapped … By homicidal pigeons?" the Doctor repeated, stopping in his tracks and causing a couple of the people behind him to send irritated looks his way.

"Yes, homicidal pigeons." Rose said. "You see," she added, spinning around to point at him accusingly, "this is what happens when you get irresponsible."

**~THIS BREAK IS POINTING OUT THAT PIGEONS ARE ACTUALLY TERRIFYING~**

One of the escalators Rose and Mickey had been riding up (while the Doctor took the stairs) was controlled by an army of homicidal pigeons hiding underneath the London Tube. At will, they could program one of the steps to disappear suddenly, causing the person standing on it to fall down a tube to their secret lair, where they, apparently, killed and ate people.

Mickey was their next target, and, for obvious reasons, not very happy about it.

"Why do you want to eat _me_?" he asked the pigeons – or what he could see of them, anyway, from his position suspended above them on what felt suspiciously like a human-sized roasting stick. "I'm scrawny, and bony, and I definitely don't taste very good."

After his conversation with Rose, Mickey had resolved himself to be brave, and not let these pigeons get the best of him. They were just pigeons, after all – albeit, pigeons the size of small dogs, with talons like the sharpest of hunting knives, and beady eyes containing more evil than an orthodontist about to install your braces … But pigeons, nonetheless … Scary pigeons, but still, pigeons …

Needless to say, his campaign of bravery wasn't going so well.

Actually, it was less like a campaign of bravery and more like a campaign of not crying.

But hey, at least he … well … wasn't crying any more, right?

"Seriously," Mickey continued, summoning all of the bravado he could muster, "I'm the worst-tasting human you could ever find."

"Silly, puny creature," one of the biggest pigeons hissed (which was funny, because Mickey was about ten times its size.) "Of course, you will taste delicious. All humans taste delicious – and you, you are a special delicacy. We don't often catch the brown ones. Do you taste like dark chocolate? We _love_ dark chocolate …"

All of the other pigeons (there must have been at least fifty of them, surrounding Mickey in a damp, eerie cavern) cheered, clearly excited to taste Mickey's blood.

"Great," he muttered. "They're going to eat me, no matter what I say."

"False!" the head pigeon cried out. "We will only eat you if you cannot tell us where to find the Doctor!"

"The Doctor," the other pigeons repeated.

"What?" Mickey asked. "What do you want _him_ for? He'd never let you eat him."

They laughed – and if you've never heard a pigeon laugh, consider yourself lucky, because it gave poor Mickey nightmares for years.

"We don't want to eat _him_," the head pigeon replied. "We want his _knowledge_. We want to eat his knowledge."

"Eat his knowledge!" the other pigeons shouted.

"Well, too bad," called a voice from the back of the cavern, "because that'll only happen over my dead body."

**~THE PIGEONS WANT TO EAT YOUUUUU AND THIS BREAK~**

It was the Doctor, of course – Mickey had never been so glad to see that stupid, huge trench coat and that stupid, law-of-gravity-defying hair before in his life.

But, being the Doctor, he couldn't simply kill all of the pigeons in some clever, creative way – no, instead he had to prance around a bit, lecturing the pigeons like a disappointed father about what cruel creatures they were, and how dare they threaten to eat innocent people, just because they were hungry. And then, he had to distract them with some fresh bread that he'd apparently been keeping in his trench coat for just such a purpose, and then he had to find their spaceship (because of course these weren't just _any_ homicidal pigeons, no, they were _alien_ homicidal pigeons) and fix it for them with his sonic screwdriver so that they could leave and stop terrorizing the planet but not have to die themselves, and then he had to warn them not to ever eat people again, or he'd revoke their bread privileges, and then he had to supervise as they boarded their spaceship and disappeared into a little pocket of rift energy that had apparently been underneath the Tube that whole time, and _then_ he had to brag to Rose about how he saved the day, and Mickey was so not amused.

"Oi," he yelled. "Still tied up, over here!"

"Oh, sorry, Mick," the Doctor called back, grinning. "Didn't see you there."

Mickey rolled his eyes, trying not to show how much his bound arms and feet were starting to hurt.

"Alright, alright, I'll untie you. Just give me a sec to find where I put my sonic …"

It was only as the Doctor soniced the bands on Mickey's wrists apart that he noticed something he probably should have been making fun of that entire time: "Doctor, you're wearing a hat."

"I am," the Doctor replied, proudly, as though Mickey had commented on his excellent saving-people-from-homicidal-pigeons skills, tipping the hat in question, a classy black fedora.

"He bought it from this sketchy hat store we saw on our way here," Rose explained. "_I_ think it's disgustingly ugly."

"I think it's brilliant," Mickey countered.

"Thanks, mate," the Doctor said, relieving the last of Mickey's limbs. "Finally, someone who appreciates my exquisite sense of style."

Rose rolled her eyes. "He's just grateful to you for rescuing him from death by pigeon, Doctor. He doesn't actually mean it."

But she must have liked the hat, too, because as they ambled back to the TARDIS, she snuck up behind the Doctor, snatched the hat from his head, sprinted inside, and wouldn't give it back until he remembered that he owed her a trip to Space Florida.

"But I haven't finished running up all of the stairs!" he protested as he plumped the hat back on.

"Save that for the next time you get bored," she retorted, "if you can remember which ones you've run up and which ones you haven't, that is."


End file.
